1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a device for the automatic opening and closing of reaction vessels. In particular, the invention relates to the automatic opening and closing of reaction vessels with lids which may be screwed on to the reaction vessels. The invention is meant to be suitable in particular for applications involving a robot for the conduct of chemical and/or biological reactions.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are known devices for the automatic opening and closing of reaction vessels which have a gripper which may be activated to grip a lid and is provided with a rotating mechanism so that the gripper may be used to screw the lid on to a reaction vessel and to unscrew it from a reaction vessel. The reaction vessels generally have a special shape, so that they engage positively in a suitable holding area in a holder. By this means, a non-rotatable placement of the reaction vessel is ensured.
Known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,340 B1 is a similar device in which the reaction vessels have vertical ribs in a specific zone, so that they can engage positively in a holding element. This ensures non-rotatable placement of the reaction vessels. The lid of these reaction vessels is made with two horizontal slits, arranged diametrically opposite one another in the upper section of the body of the lid. Each of these slits leads at one end to the top of the lid, so that a lid gripping mechanism may engage in the lids by means of a horizontal pin, and is able to exert the necessary torque on the lid in order to unscrew it from the reaction vessel. For this gripper it is advantageous that it is not provided with a special operating mechanism for active gripping of the lid, but instead is able to engage the lid only passively by engaging the pins in the slits. This facilitates integration into a robot, since in this way an additional control function may be omitted. The drawback of this device, however, is that only specially designed lids may be used. It is not therefore possible to use reaction vessels obtained by a customer and closed with a conventional lid in a production process with such a device for the automatic opening and closing of reaction vessels, without replacing the lid. This would entail replacing a conventional lid by a lid specially designed for this purpose. Moreover these special lids are expensive.